Entries tagged with cutting through bullshit

I’ll forgive most things if I’m given an apology. To me, all an apology means is that you know you did something unacceptable or hurtful and you’re going to try not to do it again. Too many people refuse to apologize even though they know they’ve done something wrong, because they’re too proud. I don’t smack people in the face with their apologies… I take them and move on, or I don’t.

There are several kinds of apologies that I won’t accept. Some of them show you immediately that they’re insincere. One of my older brothers got very verbally abusive with me several months ago, and then wrote an “I’m sorry” on my blog. Unfortunately, it was in the form of an “I’m sorry that you’re stupid and you don’t get this and that you think that I’m being hurtful” apology, and then he followed it up with some more verbal abuse.

I refused his apology. I have the freedom to do that, you see, as the offended party.

There are other kinds of apologies that I won’t take. When I say that an apology is “insincere” and that “you don’t mean it”, I don’t mean that you don’t have any emotion in your apology. I mean that your apology is useless because you have no intentions of backing it up with any actions. You may realize that what you did was wrong (you may not. You may just be apologizing so that you can get whatever privelidges back that you lost), but you have no intention of attempting to not do it again.

People have patterns. When people have a record, with you and with others, of “apologizing” and then never making any moves to recompense, and then later turning around and do the thing again, their apologies become worthless. As my mother used to say, “You can be as sorry as you want to, but don’t do it again.” I don’t need apologies, I need to know folk aren’t gonna fuck me over. Without that, “I’m sorry” is nothing but empty words, and blubbering on about what a terrible person you is nothing but a self-pitying plea for someone to disagree.

You can say I’m sorry from here ’till the end of time, and if you just keep doing the same shit over again, none of it matters.

And that’s why I don’t take all apologies. It’s reasonable, if you think about it. You fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…

Well, fool me twice and you’re likely to get a slew of phone calls, emails, and blog entries telling you what a fucking asshole you are.

But you also won’t win my friendship back with an empty, meaningless apology.

Why do so many people seem to think that they can buy the right to be an asshole? Has anyone else ever noticed this? They do something nice for you, and ever after that, you’re never allowed to be displeased with anything they do. They can talk to you however they like, treat you however they like, and because they did something nice at some point in your shared history, you should just shut up and be grateful. “I did XYZ for you, and this is the thanks I get????” yes, this is the thanks you get. It doesn’t buy your way out of being responsible for your actions.

I see people do this in the market as well, of course. You bought a meal at a resturaunt so you have the right to be an asshole to the waitress, and then bitch to the manager when she doesn’t keep smiling at you. You’re paying for something at a store so you’re welcome to be rude to the staff there.

Because, y’see, you don’t get to buy the right to be an asshole. You can bend over backwards doing something for someone and when you turn around and stab them in the back, they’re still going to be mad at you. You can give someone a million dollars and it doesn’t give you the right to take out your aggression on them.

I’m not going to say I don’t get it. I definitely get it. It’s an excuse. A simple-minded one, at that. It’s an opportunity for someone who’s victimizing someone else to play the victim. It’s how simple, stupid, unsocialized and uneducated morons recuse themselves from being held accountable for being bullies.

I read this blog post today: http://ohtobking.livejournal.com/908.html . It was written back in December and I haven’t had any ill dealings with my father since. The odd thing is, I didn’t have any ill dealings with him at the TIME, either. I’ve searched through emails, I’ve gone back over livejournal entries, and I haven’t found anything between the cordial passing of “happy holidays” emails between him and I on the 26th and the next time we spoke at some point in January with him asking if I had his email address blocked (and, fyi, I’d never actually HAD his email address blocked. I don’t block people’s email addresses until they harass me. I simply removed him from my LJ friends list and removed MYSELF from my message board) and me responding that I hadn’t, and then a series of emails asking how each other were.

So you can imagine my surprise when I stumbled over this today. And my first response was, “Well damn.”

I wrote a couple of “friends only” LJ entries on the whole thing but the long and short of it is that I had realized earlier at some point that the source of a LOOOOT of my relationship problems stem from the way my parents’ have spoken to me. Dad has continuously brought up instances of me acting out of a teenager (that, notably, I don’t remember) and Mom has continuously told me what an ungrateful brat I am (when she wasn’t worrying about me going to Hell), and the truth is, I expect the same from everyone else. I think I always have. To be honest, I’m not even sure I believed it from THEM… I’ve just always expected it from other people.

Which is, I think, why I tend to beat people to the punch. I decide for myself “they don’t want me around”, and then I get bitter about it. I can trace instances of this and it makes me cringe. And it’s not that the other people in those situations were exactly FAULTLESS… but I didn’t have much grace for them, either. Because they were just doing what I’d always known they’d do.

Even if they weren’t actually doing it.

So today I begin anew, methinks. For one thing, my father is off the hook. Whether he wants to be a part of my life at all or not, I’m beyond expecting him to make up for the behavior that’s been exhibited in the past, including this particular blog. Fact of the matter is, I’m beyond expecting anything different from him. As far as my older brother is concerned (who is the glad recipient of the previous blog entry, and you can find the rest of his crazy ass here , if you’re that interested… go on, have a good time. Tell him I sent you), he’s got his own bag of issues and I don’t have any interest in dealing with someone who’s going to toy with my emotions and fuck with my head.

The bottom line, though, is that even when I think these things myself… it’s really, really healing to hear it from other people. I had already begun to have the conversation with myself on the question of “What kind of parent says things like that about his own kid on the internet???” and ask myself what I’d think if I’d just stumbled across that blog and didn’t know who it was.

But here, for my sake and the sake of any of my family who may be reading who happen to SHARE Dad’s particularly low opinion of me (and my sanity), I figured I’d repeat some of the things that they said that resonated with me. They’re general good advice and thoughts for anyone going through anything like a similar situation.

Abuse is abuse, no matter how old you are. This is abuse. You don’t have to stay in an abusive situation, regardless of who you may be related to. You are not required to pursue abusive relationships.